Scientific literacy, optimism about science and conservatism (original) (raw)

Introduction

A number of scholars have argued that conservatives exhibit a cognitive style that renders them less well disposed toward science than progressives,1 and that they are correspondingly less trusting of scientific institutions and less knowledgeable about scientific ideas (Jost et al., 2003, Mooney, 2005, Mooney, 2012, Hennes et al., 2012, Lewandowsky et al., 2013). Compared to progressives, conservatives tend to be inflexible and dogmatic, intolerant of uncertainty, obsessed with security, disposed toward prejudice, and prone to biased reasoning. This is said to explain why they are less likely to believe in widely accepted scientific ideas such as the theory of evolution (Kohut, Doherty, & Dimmock, 2009), and why they place less trust in the scientific community (Gauchat, 2012). Other researchers, however, have contested these claims (Ray 1974, Greenberg and Jonas, 2003, Kahan, 2013, Duarte et al., 2014, Dixon and Jones, 2015). It has been averred that progressives are in fact no less prejudiced than conservatives; but rather, that they are simply prejudiced against different groups (Wetherell et al., 2013, Crawford, 2014, Crawford et al., 2015). For example, while conservatives tend to be less tolerant of welfare recipients, progressives tend to be less tolerant of religious people (Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, & Wetherell, 2014). Another retort has been that progressives are actually no less prone to denying scientific facts than conservatives; it is simply that they deny different facts, namely those which conflict with progressive sacred values (Haidt, 2012, McRight et al., 2013, Berezow and Campbell, 2012). For example, many progressives deny even the possibility of statistical differences between the sexes or races, since such differences would be an affront to the progressive sacred value of equality (Pinker, 2002, Woodley, 2010, Winegard and Winegard, 2015, Cofnas, 2015).

Furthermore, recent evidence indicates that a single ideological axis running from progressive to conservative is insufficient to characterise the distribution of political beliefs in countries such as the United States (Terrizzi et al., 2013, Feldman and Johnston, 2014, Carl, 2015a, Carl, 2015b; and see De Regt, Mortelmans, & Smits, 2011). For example, cognitive ability appears to have a positive relationship with both socially liberal beliefs and at least some measures of fiscally conservative beliefs (Carl, 2015a, Carl, 2015b; and see Weakliem, 2002, Oskarsson et al., 2014, Mollerstrom and Seim, 2014). Moreover, a recent cross-national study found that need for security and certainty is negatively associated with right-wing economic attitudes, despite being positively associated with socially conservative attitudes (Malka, Soto, Inzlicht, & Lelkes, 2014). Here we test the hypothesis that differences between conservatives and progressives on scientific literacy and optimism about science vary depending on how ‘conservative’ is defined.

Section snippets

Data

Data are from the 2000–2014 waves of U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), a public opinion survey that has been administered to a nationally representative sample of American adults every 1–2

years since 1972 (see Smith et al., 2014). We utilise the 2000–2014 waves of the survey both for contemporary relevance and because very few of our outcome variables were administered in earlier waves.

Measures

The first definition of ‘conservative’ that we employ is simply: identifying as conservative, rather than as

Correlations between measures of conservatism

Table 1 displays correlations between our measures of conservatism. (Unweighted n's for individual cells range from 2847 to 8499.) Although all 10 are significant, the correlations of conservative self-identity with social conservatism measures (r

.32, r

.27) and economic conservatism measures (r

.32, r

.36) are all considerably larger than the correlation between social conservatism measures and economic conservatism measures (r

.07, r

.05, r

.09). This illustrates the fact that, at

Discussion

This study used data from the U.S. General Social Survey to examine whether differences between conservatives and progressives on scientific literacy and optimism about science vary depending on how ‘conservative’ is defined. It found that self-identified conservatives and social conservatives are less scientifically literate and optimistic about science than, respectively, self-identified liberals and social progressives; but that, in contrast, economic conservatives are as or more

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the National Opinion Research Centre for making their data available to researchers. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier versions of the manuscript.